I could have sworn I asked this question before, but I can’t find my old thread on it now.
After you’ve imported a hierarchy with a few hundred or thousand objects, how do you hide it?
And if you don’t want it in the scene anymore, how do you delete it?
I don’t see a “select all children” option.
Do I really need to expand the entire sub tree and scroll to find the end (a horror show if you have more than one large imported object), and hold shift select to delete or hide?
(EDIT: I know I have an entire suggestion thread on this, but I’m fairly certain someone gave me a tip on this at one point.)
(EDIT: How do you even convert it to a blueprint? I know in a different thread that someone said it was difficult to have this done automatically for some reason, but surely it must be easy to do manually? But the only blueprint button I see disappears the moment I select more than one object.)
I tend to use Blutilities for this kind of thing. They are blueprints that you can run in the editor. I’ve included a picture of a simple blutility function that selects all the ‘siblings’ of a selected actor. (You might have to write a recursive function to get all children rather than just immediate children.)
It boggles my mind that this functionality isn’t included in the world outliner (unless like you I am also missing something)
Also, level streaming might help to hide/show a hierarchy. This works fairly well if it’s the only hierarchy you are importing, as you can just create a new level for each one and stream them in. If you import something with multiple hierarchies, and want to move one to another level you run into the ‘select all children’ issue again.
You are right and it’s not. We are starting to look at general UX improvements like this and we have it done internally, but you’ll have to wait for 4.22
“I feel like every model you import here as well should be a Blueprint.”
Some of the earlier versions of datasmith had that as an option, but then they got rid of it. I’m sure there were good reasons, but I’ve been making that feature request repeatedly since. Hopefully they will find a way to work it back in!
Again, I can’t find the thread, but the last time I asked about it I’m fairly certain I got an official reply that it was due to it being buggy.
But yes, they absolutely need to fix it for future releases. It is just as baffling that it doesn’t work that way, as the lack of standard hierarchy operations in an as mature product as this is:
It is very good that we at least have an answer that it is on the drawing board now. (I wonder if this is why the entire UI of Unreal Editor feels so chaotic and unorganized. It’s not just that you can’t easily manage the world outliner, but that the entire philosophy of everything they do seems a bit messy. It feels as if every icon in the entire application has a different size. It’s like one of those artists who has a workshop that looks like a bomb went off in it, but produce beautiful art. With Unreal Studio, more engineers will look at Unreal and expect some sort of order, I hope. It’s also interesting to note how everyone is going for a flat interface these days, while Unreal Editor is STRONGLY the absolute opposite. It’s good that Unreal produces as good graphics as it does, because the graphics really need to overpower the interface, which is the “loudest” interface I’ve ever seen.)
